As various regions continue to push for increased age restrictions on social media access, Meta has put its support behind the latest push for more teen protections in Europe, though its motivations for this initiative are worth considering.
Late last week, Meta published a statement endorsing the proposal to establish a common Digital Majority Age across EU member states, which, in its present form, would likely restrict social media access to those over 15, though that could also be increased to 16 after consultation.
The current age limit for social media access is generally 13, though there’s no uniformity across platforms, and the checking processes to confirm such are limited.
To be clear, Meta hasn’t explicitly endorsed any specific age barrier, as such, but it has put its support behind proposals to implement improved age-checking and monitoring measures, in order to ensure that youngsters are not able to access adult content.
As per Meta:
“At Meta, ensuring the safety of young people is a top priority and we’ve spent over a decade building our products for teens with this in mind. Across the industry, there is growing recognition that teens deserve consistent protection across all the different digital platforms they use. That’s why we support proposals to establish a common Digital Majority Age across EU member states, whereby parents need to approve their younger teens’ access to digital services, including social media.”
In initial consultations, various EU member states have proposed a 15 year-old social media access limit, with France, Greece and Denmark all putting their support behind higher age restrictions. Spain, meanwhile, has proposed a 16 year-old access restriction, following the lead of Australia, which is moving to make 16 the age limit by law in the near future.
The challenge here is that there’s no uniform checking process in place to detect user age, and as such, enforcement is difficult. That essentially means that each platform is left to implement its own age detection measures, which, if put into law, could end up unfairly penalizing lesser-resourced companies.
Advanced video age checking, which enables users to confirm their age via a selfie clip, has gained some traction of late, with Meta itself experimenting with this as a means to combat underage access.
That seems like the most likely path to enforcement, though there are concerns about uploading selfie images, and how that data is kept.
As such, Meta has also proposed an alternative solution, in pushing the app providers to verify user ages at the app download level instead, thereby taking the heat off of Meta and other platforms.
Which is the first key motivation of Meta’s endorsement of this new EU initiative.
And there is merit to this. Under Meta’s proposal, the app stores would need to check a user’s age before they enable an app download, and if an app is restricted to a certain age, the user would need parental permission to download it.
That makes sense, as opposed to however many thousands of apps implementing their own age checking measures, though Apple and Google are pushing back on such, as they don’t want to be liable for penalties if their systems fail to limit young teen access.
They’d prefer that Meta and other platforms take the heat instead, but there is some logic to Meta’s push to re-focus the age restrictions push onto the providers instead.
Meta’s been pushing this for some time, and lobbying politicians to implement this as a legal requirement. An increased push in Europe could help in this respect, and could end up alleviating Meta of a significant potential liability.
Another element to consider in Meta’s public support of the initiative is who’s going to end up losing out the most in this process.
Yes, Meta’s going to lose users if new age barriers are implemented, as many teens under 15 are active on Facebook and Instagram. But TikTok will lose more, as will Snapchat, and on balance, Meta’s making a calculated PR push in this instance, which will make it look good in the eyes of regulators, but will also punish its competition far more than its own apps.
So while Meta’s overarching goal here is to ensure better protection for kids, it is worth noting that the company also stands to gain from any regulation that’s implemented, one way or another, if this new proposal does go into effect.
So while it might seem surprising in some ways that Meta would be in support of these proposals, it makes sense from a business perspective, and Meta has repeatedly shown that it’ll prioritize its business interests over everything else.
As such, it is worth looking a little further into Meta’s motivations on this front, and considering why it would be keen to support increasing age restrictions on social apps.
The final outcome should be more uniform age checking, and thus, better protection for kids online. But don’t mistake Meta’s welfare concerns as being entirely altruistic.
